First I happened to see a post in the Chinese WordPress forum mentioning a feature of Yeeyan (this site seems pretty good): marginal annotations. You can add notes to every paragraph in an article, and registered members can very conveniently discuss specific paragraphs. For a translation community like this, such a feature is simply a brilliant design.
I was instantly drawn to this feature. I was trying to build an academic blog for the Web 2.0 era, and the most basic effect this kind of academic model hopes to achieve is: “infinite margins” — the blank space at the side of the page, or rather the space for communication, will be interactive and infinite. This is an important potential that print scholarship can never, no matter what, match in comparison with online scholarship.
But although the traditional comment model is already very flexible and rich, it has lost the close distance between the margins of a printed book and the specific paragraph being discussed. Especially for a long article, having to drag down to the bottom of the page every time to comment really diminishes the reading experience. In other words, either I interrupt my reading and go write a comment, or I wait until I’ve finished the whole article before writing one. In that case, although the “page margin” has been extended infinitely, it is only extended “downward,” becoming “bottom-of-page blank space” instead…
The perfect “margin” should let readers take notes as they read, then keep reading after noting, and at the same time see the annotations of earlier readers while reading the author’s words. Can such a function be realized on the web?
Of course, one way would be simply not to publish long articles at all, but instead to publish them a paragraph at a time, like Twitter or Weibo. This format does indeed more fully embody the characteristics of the internet and far surpasses the scope of the print era. But as for academic texts, no matter how the times change, it is still hard to imagine them being published in units of a hundred-odd characters. Yet the potential of the internet is huge, and there must surely be other solutions. A mode in which articles are published as units, but can be annotated and discussed by paragraph, is the most satisfying.
How can such a function be implemented? In the replies below that post on the forum, one user gave a website: linebuzz. After registering on that site and inserting JS code into the blog, one can select any piece of text anywhere on the page for annotation and discussion. But this service requires every annotator to register as a member of theirs, and the comment data will also be stored on their website. The more fatal problem is that the final update log on that site goes only as far as 2007…
There is also another famous Web 2.0 site, diigo, which requires installing a browser plugin for each user, after which one can add highlights and notes to any text on any website and communicate with other netizens who have installed diigo. The function is good, but it is even more troublesome, and the bigger problem is that this great website, like most of the greatest Web 2.0 websites, has been blocked…
So I turned once again to the omnipotent WordPress: among its countless plugins, couldn’t there be one that could achieve a similar function? After changing a few keywords, I finally found a useful one: Feedback by Paragraph
This plugin is still far from perfect. For example, the backend settings are very weak, so I had to manually edit the CSS and PHP to add a URL option when commenting, add the statement that accurately records the comment time in the database (after searching for ages, it turned out that current_time is more convenient), solve its conflict with the emoticon plugin, and make the annotations also appear in the comment list at the bottom. Tormenting this plugin taught me quite a bit of PHP… But after all, the function it implements is very satisfying; otherwise I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of modifying it,
The function is very simple: at the end of each paragraph (automatically inserted before the </p> tag), a marker is embedded. Clicking it immediately pops up a small window, where you can add an annotation, while also showing the annotations already attached to that paragraph. As for the marker at the end of the paragraph, I originally wanted it to be transparent and completely non-intrusive, only appearing when the mouse hovers over it. But after thinking it over, this function really ought to be made more conspicuous, otherwise even fewer people would use it…
This plugin does slightly interfere with the reader’s scissors-and-paste work on the article content, and it adds a stretch of HTML code after every paragraph, making the webpage file quite a bit larger (this site has already enabled g-zip compression, so the impact on browsing speed probably isn’t too great). But it only displays on the article page and does not affect the Feed; that is to say, subscription, sharing, and other aggregation (Rss) functions will not be affected.
The only drawback is that after submitting an annotation, the webpage refreshes, which still affects the smoothness of reading. This problem can certainly be solved with Ajax technology, but for now I’m too lazy to tinker with it further. Experts are welcome to advise. Also, the Email notification function for new replies does not work for annotations.
Annotations still appear after the article like ordinary comments, except that they are set apart by a special icon and differ from ordinary comments’ Gravatar avatars (I also added the pingback icon by the way). At present these annotations can still receive nested replies in the comment list, but that function isn’t very good. It would be best if, after clicking reply in the comment list, one were taken into the corresponding paragraph to discuss there, distinguishing it from ordinary nested comments. Of course, in theory this function can certainly be implemented, but it also exceeds the level of tinkering I can currently bear. Experts are also welcome to advise~
By the way, I’ve also newly added an “upload file” function in the comments section after the article.
When it comes to blog design, what I emphasize most is the commenting part, and I have gone to every possible length to add comment-related functions. But the result may still be: almost nobody comes to comment… allow me to cry first…
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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